Internet tycoon Kim Dotcom's cash, cars and property were seized using a court order which should never have been granted.
A judgment from Justice Judith Potter on Friday declared the restraining order "null and void" and having "no legal effect".
The blunder might now lead to the beleaguered internet mogul getting back everything that was stripped away in the surprise dawn raid on his mansion eight weeks ago.

For the first time since his arrest in January, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is responding to allegations in what he calls the â€œMPAA-sponsoredâ€ indictment. Eager to fight back, Dotcom refutes several â€œnonsenseâ€ claims made by the Government. In addition, he shows that Mega wasnâ€™t a big bad pirate haven, but a legitimate service that may have been shutdown for political reasons.

Warner Bros., for example, asked Megavideo if they could provide a tool to automatically upload content from the movie studio. â€œWe would like to upload our content all at once instead of one video at a time,â€ Warnerâ€™s Joshua Carver wrote.
More details on these partnership emails are published in a separate article here.
And then thereâ€™s the issue of the millions of site users that didnâ€™t use it as a pirate haven. US Government workers had many accounts at Megaupload, as did those at MPAA member companies and those employed by the US Military.
Many of these users paid for a premium account and uploaded a variety of content. Talking to TorrentFreak, Kim Dotcom suggested that of the 15,634 soldiers that used Megaupload, many were probably using it to share pictures and videos with their loved ones at home.
More details on the government, MPAA and military users are published in a separate article here.A Political Scandal?

Having digested the above, it does indeed seem that the US indictment doesnâ€™t tell the whole story, or that itâ€™s one-sided to say the least. This begs the question of why Mega was so aggressively targeted.
What we do know is that the copyright lobby, headed by the MPAA, has been one of the main facilitators of the criminal investigation. Itâ€™s also not a secret that the MPAA and other lobby groups hire former high ranked Government officials and vice versa.
The current head of the MPAA for example is former Senator Chris Dodd, and in recent months alone the MPAA also hired former employees from the Justice Department, the White House staff and the Senate Judiciary Committee. Needless to say, the movie industry group is well-connected in Washington.
On the other hand we see that Neil MacBride, the U.S attorney who filed the Mega indictment, has connections to the copyright lobby as well. In fact, he served as the Vice President for Anti-Piracy and General Counsel of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), MPAAâ€™s software counterpart.
It wouldnâ€™t be a huge surprise if the Mega investigation was somewhat of a â€˜giftâ€™ to Hollywood, a theory which Megauploadâ€™s founder subscribes to.
â€œMega has become a re-election pawn in the White House / MPAA affair. If I was a Republican presidential candidate I would investigate this,â€ Dotcom says.
However, this gift isnâ€™t as free as it may seem. Dotcom says that the witch hunt against his company is putting the US technology sector at a disadvantage.
â€œThe MPAA / White House corruption has weakened US technology leadership. Internet businesses, hosting, cloud, payment processors, ad networks, etc. are going to avoid the US,â€ Dotcom told TorrentFreak.
â€œThere is an opportunity for liberal countries to welcome those businesses with better laws,â€ he predicts. â€œThe loss of IT business & jobs in the US will substantially outweigh the inflated losses claimed by the MPAA & their billionaire club.â€
For now, however, Dotcom is mainly concerned with taking the criminal indictment apart. He is confident that he and his legal team will succeed in this and promises fireworks when the complete motion is published.
â€œWe did nothing wrong. Watch out for our first motion in response to the MPAA-sponsored Department of Justice indictment. It will be enlightening and maybe entertaining,â€ Dotcom concludes.

@ Blob: Just a very quick fair-use/netiquette note for future reference:

Don't copy/paste whole articles. It's rude (amongst other things). Also, unformatted walls of text like that are torture on the eyes.

Quote the opening paragraph or a few relevant bits to give the reader a taste of the article and then let them decide if they want to click the link and read the rest. Here's a revision of your above post in a more acceptable format:
--------------------------------

For the first time since his arrest in January, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is responding to allegations in what he calls the â€œMPAA-sponsoredâ€ indictment. Eager to fight back, Dotcom refutes several â€œnonsenseâ€ claims made by the Government. In addition, he shows that Mega wasnâ€™t a big bad pirate haven, but a legitimate service that may have been shutdown for political reasons.

This is really a heavy on-topic thread Dredd
I did edit it down some per your request but I doubt that guy would yell I was not doing fair use.
IP is imprtant and this guy is PR Crazy but which side crossed the line here?

“It is one thing to take legal action against an alleged copyright infringer. It is quite another to do so at the expense of entirely innocent third parties, with no attempt to prevent or even mitigate the collateral damage,” the brief starts.
The attorneys explain that Goodwin signed up for a premium Megaupload account that he used to store raw footage of games, player and coach interviews, and promotional materials for his business. This Megaupload account served as an online backup of the files he stored on his hard drive, in case that crashed.
Unfortunately for Goodwin the hard drive did indeed crash in January, right after Megaupload was shutdown. However, when he attempted to download the backup files, he noticed that Megaupload was no longer operational. As a result, the sports reporter claims to have suffered significant losses.

Copying big parts of an article is plagiarism as well, if not a copyright violation, even if it's found on a public website. In many countries, the maintainer of a website can be held liable for things done by forum members if not acted on quickly enough. Maybe the chance for it to happen is low, but if a greedy lawyer notices it, he might send a cease-and-desist letter which comes with a 4 digit invoice if agreed to it not reacted on quickly enough. In Germany we have a whole army of these people.

My how times have changed, we used to always put the whole thing in case the link broke/moved/people too lazy to click it. Stupid lawyers ruin everything.

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Times haven't changed, this place's just so dead in terms of user traffic, seems like the mods're itching moderate anything & everything.
It's like I can visit reddit, and then come here, and see stuff from the previous few days slowing aggregating into the "weird **** on the interwebs" thread. Why isn't that a concern? Reposted content, without original source, hmm?

Nothing wrong with quoting stuff. C&Ds, over a quote? Even if you get one (in that inanely remote chance), all you have to do is take it down. I can't believe you even remotely consider that an issue, even more so over a news article. Even more so from TorrentFreak of all sources.

"Guys, they're pirating our news article!!!!1"

Copying big parts of an article is plagiarism as well.

Click to expand...

If you try to pass it off as your own sure.
He sure wasn't. Quotes, original source, lol what?

It's like I can visit reddit, and then come here, and see stuff from the previous few days slowing aggregating into the "weird **** on the interwebs" thread. Why isn't that a concern? Reposted content, without original source, hmm?

Click to expand...

Reddit is not a original source for anything except AMA's and ASK Reddit.

Check the words "Via imgur" and "original source" and what the words mean in context.

I did not say "original content" what do you think a place called reddit is? It's recommendations and links of things read elsewhere by definition.
Is a site like that free speech or a copyright violation evil that must be stamped out with disregard of due process?

I'm no lawyer, but I wouldn't be that sure that adding a link is enough of that. It could still be regarded as a copyright violation.

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Maybe in Germany, but probably not over here. Fair Use is a fairly powerful defense to copyright infringement. That's not to say some attorney wouldn't send a C&D, it just means it would be very unlikely to make it past discovery/pleadings.

We attorneys like to send C&Ds (I actually prefer calling them ALLs, or Angry Lawyer Letters) all of the time, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have the law to back them up. :wink:

People can be kept in investigative custody for a certain amount of time if there's are substantial risk of escape or obfuscation. Or is it just a matter of the amount of bail money? How easy is it to escape from the US when being released on bail?

If I had to expect a long prison sentence, I would try a lot of things to escape.

A US judge has put a bomb under the Megaupload case by informing the FBI that a trial in the United States may never happen. The cyberlocker was never formally served with the appropriate paperwork by the US authorities, as it is impossible to serve a foreign company with criminal charges.

Opps!

It turns out that the US judge handling the case has serious doubts whether it will ever go to trial due to a procedural error.
“I frankly don’t know that we are ever going to have a trial in this matter,” Judge O’Grady said as reported by the NZ Herald.
Judge O’Grady informed the FBI that Megaupload was never served with criminal charges, which is a requirement to start the trial. The origin of this problem is not merely a matter of oversight. Megaupload’s lawyer Ira Rothken says that unlike people, companies can’t be served outside US jurisdiction.
“My understanding as to why they haven’t done that is because they can’t. We don’t believe Megaupload can be served in a criminal matter because it is not located within the jurisdiction of the United States,” Rothken says.
Megaupload’s lawyer adds that he doesn’t understand why the US authorities weren’t aware of this problem before. As a result Judge O’Grady noted that Megaupload is “kind of hanging out there.”

[h=4]Kim Dotcom Lashes Out Against “Corrupt” US Government[/h] “The US government has terminated Megaupload, Megavideo and 10 other subsidiaries, including a company called N1 Limited that was developing a clothing line,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak.
“They destroyed 220 jobs. Millions of legitimate Mega users have no access to their files.”
If Judge O’Grady is to be believed all this damage could very well have been for nothing because the authorities simply can’t serve foreign companies. This could lead one to wonder whether the whole setup was to simply destroy Mega’s businesses.
This is certainly a theory Dotcom subscribes to, and it’s not the only dirty trick Megaupload’s founder believes the US Government is playing. The US is structurally denying Megaupload the chance to put up a fair fight.
“We are refused access to the evidence that clears us, we are refused funds to pay our lawyers, we are refused to pick the lawyers we want to represent us and have any chance for a fair trial,” Dotcom says.
For Megaupload the worst part is that the damage can’t be undone. The site has been completely destroyed as well as the plans to become a publicly traded company.
“We have already been served a death sentence without trial and even if we are found ‘not guilty’ which we will, the damage can never be repaired,” Dotcom says.
And why?
According to Megaupload’s founder it is quite clear that the Mega investigation was a ‘gift’ to Hollywood, facilitated by corrupt forces.
“This Mega takedown was possible because of corruption on the highest political level, serving the interests of the copyright extremists in Hollywood,” he says. “Mega has become a re-election pawn.”
Nevertheless, Dotcom is confident that these forces will eventually be exposed.
“It is just a matter of time until the truth comes out. We are working on that and we are making good progress,” Dotcom concludes.